


PLEASE DO NOT #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend! Here's Why.

by Koniro_Yotsuyu



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: American Politics, M/M, Politics, fannish non-fiction, give captain america a boyfriend, non-fiction, ramble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-26
Updated: 2016-05-26
Packaged: 2018-07-10 08:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6976069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koniro_Yotsuyu/pseuds/Koniro_Yotsuyu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My perspective as a long time Avengers slash writer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	PLEASE DO NOT #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend! Here's Why.

**Author's Note:**

> Before reading, please know that if you are interested in having a civil discussion about this, you can always leave a comment. I am more than a little interested in what you have to say. You can also do so as Anon, since I know that sometimes it's hard to come out and say what you think. However, if you are a troll, don't expect me to reply,I won't regulate the comments though, because I'm not interested in fighting fire with fire. Also this is my opinion, i don't claim to know everything, yadda yadda yadda. Please enjoy my rant.
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> EDIT: Sorry, I can't answer to the comments anymore, there's just so many of them! I spent hours upon hours on it at this point, feel free to have your own conversations if you want.
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> Also this is not about Stucky! I don't have a grudge with Stucky shippers! And I don't really really think they are to blame for this, don't start a shipping war, please.

 

If you have clicked the link because you come from my _Post-War Depression_ work. You may be a little shocked as to why this is my opinion. If you don’t, I’ll have you know that this work is part of a Marvel fanfic series that works as a multi-pairing, choose-your-own-adventure-esque story and its central pair is, of course Stony.

So I believe you might be a bit puzzled as to why I would be against the idea of Steve getting a boyfriend, unless you agree with me, In which case, it’s pretty self explanatory.

And as we speak of this, first and foremost, we should address the social and moral claim that this hashtag is standing on. It’s not a group of fan fiction writers or fan art rebloggers, this was an article made by a left-lenient writer of the New York Times. So do keep this in mind, this was not about how good it would or wouldn’t be, this argument got sparked by the idea that gay  people are oppressed because captain America does not kiss Tony at the end of Civil War ~~the only boyfriend Cap should ever have~~. In other words, this isn’t “wouldn’t it be great if x?” but rather “It’s so terrible that Y” (an attitude that I simply cannot stand behind).

So, having gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about representation a little. There is no one being oppressed by Captain America’s sexuality. There are no rights being violated by it. And I often hear people toss around the phrase “We have the right to turn on the TV without feeling like the world is excluding us”

The answer to that is fairly simple: No you don’t.

How entitled do you need to be? If you believe that spending money on looking at a colorful light screen for purely recreational purposes, because you have enough leftovers, to even tweet about just how oppressed you are and seek validation from other people who also have the same access to colorful screens now that they have all of their basic needs covered.

You don’t have the right to get people’s products to be made specifically for you! You don’t have the right to demand shirts your exact size or movies that appeal to your tastes, you don’t have the right to that, because you don’t make the products, and you don’t need them to survive. I’m sorry if my approach is too aggressively capitalist-oriented, but It’s a bias I doubt I will ever lose having grown up in a country devastated by neo-communism

Now that we got that out of the way, let us delve into the question that we, the logical people who don’t suffer from a victim complex are mostly concerned with: Would it be better if Steve had a boyfriend?

For that we need to address another common lie that we are told, this is that gays are underrepresented in media. But that is a clear lie. I want you to take a guess of how much of the US population is gay.

 

You got it?

Great, you are probably wrong, statistically speaking, you probably said 20% when in reality, it’s only 3%. You heard that right. So frankly, gays are **overrepresented** in media. And with good reason.

* * *

 

 **EDIT:** Just to clarify, since a lot of you took offense to this,what i'm saying that overrepresentation of identitarian minorities is a **good thing** , I had to clarify this because a lot of people seem to have interpreted it as me saying that there are too many gays in movies. Hell no! The number of gays in media is perfectly adequate. We can sit all day and argue about whether those characters perpetuate stereotypes and prejudices but that's a whole other argument. And one that I'm not interested in having at the moment because I can't possibly think of any way to portray gay people in a film that is less derogatory than just randomly slapping a rainbow on some character and pretending that this suddenly makes it the most progressive movie of the year, let's not pull a Dumbledore here  ~~although I really Love Rowling~~ , straight characters have their approach to the opposite sex well established and deeply linked to their identity. Gay characters should be no different.

And While i'm at it, let me emphasize that if you want more gay superheroes, **why not include them?!** The great thing about Marvel is that it has so many amazing queer characters whose sexualities are not some kind of punchline or slapped onto them just to get progressive points. I feel I haven't emphasized that last point well enough.

I frankly hate comic Steve Rogers. Hard not to, since he basically stands for everything that has ever caused me pain. Nationalism, government control, traditionalist values, and if you read any comics prior to 2014, he is the straightest straight to ever straight in all of straightland, he is so straight he makes my gayness feel threatened by osmosis. That's why I appreciate the Movie version of him so much! And although He still represents so many things that I'm against, I can see that ultimately, he is undeniably a good guy and he doesn't claim to have all the answers like he did in the comics... Also apparently in the comics he's with Hydra so, that's that, fuck comic Steve.  What I'm trying to say is that the "all american straight white man hero" thing i say in a couple of paragraphs has nothing to do with me defending that kind of hero over any other. In fact it's the opposite, the fact that they managed to make me like this guy, makes him that much more important, you don't often get to witness an eye-opening take on a kind of person that you previously didn't understand. It reminds me of what many Conservatives said they felt about Frank Undewood, Who is definitely making it into my fic btw.

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There are multiple minorities that are overrepresented in media, from a variety of variables. The MBTI type of an INTJ, for example ~~the best one~~ also referred to as “the scientist” or “the mastermind” ~~(yeah)~~ constitutes 2% of the US population, but the vast majority of villains and modern anti-heroes in fiction. Mental Illnesses are another over-represented field, but I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. Or what about the rates of family tragedies and childhood trauma? Also greatly overrepresented.

Now if you have read this far, you have properly noticed a pattern here. The overrepresentation generally surrounds unconventional identities. And what’s more, these overly represented types aren’t protagonists of their stories. Again, with good reason. Without Watson, the Sherlock Holmes books would be terrible, Watson impersonates a common person, and we need this person in order to make the minority characters accessible to us, majority people.

Because although I am a bisexual INTJ with an IQ of 140 and a long, complicated history of mental illness and child abuse, I can’t expect movies to be made of bisexual INTJs with an IQ of 140 and a long, complicated story of mental illness and child abuse. I am not the majority, and that’s good! Because thanks to the fascination that the majority of people have with someone like me, I immediately double down on how interesting others find me. And In order to insert a cheesy metaphor to emphasize my abstract claim, as I always do: the most valuable diamonds are not pure ones, but the ones that have been polluted in strange ways. Pink, blue and yellow diamonds are much more expensive than the white ones. Unless you believe in the conspiracy theory of diamonds actually being very common. In which case: When life gives you rotten lemons, make lemonade, sell it to some idiot, and then go buy yourself some real lemonade.

And sure, some of you may think that’s all fine and dandy for personality and identity situations, but what about gender and ethnicity? Well, allow me to show you the most biased data I could find and show you why it’s still nonsense <http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/30000-hollywood-film-characters-heres-many-werent-white/>

When reading this article you might tell yourself “wow, Hollywood is so racist” and you may or may not be right, but not under the base of representation, because as it turns out, those parameters represent almost exactly the real life split of ethnicities in the US, almost to the letter. This is a trick I’ve often seen identity politics pull, where they show you statistic information and use it to draw a logical conclusion that implies a number of leaps and inexistent correlations. It’s easy to miss it, because the average person doesn’t really have a grasp on statistics and how they work, because they are abstract concepts, and 70% of the US population has a problem with abstract concepts. ~~I’m looking at you XSXX types!~~

If you ignore enough statistic inequalities, you can wind up with all sorts of reality distortions. Is white cis male a demographic with disproportionately high suicide rates? Let us quickly draw a correlation line from that to black males as the number one victims of gun violence, skimming over the fact that they also seem to be the number one perpetrator of it.  Let us ignore the higher rates of domestic violence in black couples and lesbian couples, when compared to straight white. This is the same kind of practice that leads you to conclude that women make 75 cents to the dollar for the same job, even though that is illegal, and the economic disparity comes not from a gender pay gap, but from a gender work gap that has been well documented. Is that an indicator of sexism? That is up to you, but I assume “women are 75% less active in the work field” is not as punchy, because it doesn’t link group to individual, if you, a woman read that headline, you will just thing “huh, well, that’s strange, but I am only concerned with how active I am in the work field, the other women can be damned.” The 75 to 100, implies that you, the listener are currently making 75% less than your peers, This abstract, tendency oriented statistic, applies to **you personally**. It’s discourse, not science.

Let me be clear, I’m not claiming that I’m against gender equality, that white people are superior; I’m not even claiming that in the West, there is no longer sexism or racism. Of course I am inclined to believe that, based on other factors, but in the same way most religious people don’t try to shove their religion down your throat, I too know, that I don’t have sufficient arguments to stand strongly in either side of the fence, hence leaving that hypothesis aside for now.

And I also don’t believe that the people who perpetrate these mistaken ideas are stupid or bad, they just believe the wrong people, because like I said, most people are not good interpreting statistics. I also don’t think BLMs and Feminists have the wrong facts, they just don’t know how to interpret them properly. Instead of beginning at the premises and arriving at the conclusion, they first accept the conclusion and then re-accommodate the premises to lead to it. Basically, this is the difference between Freud and Einstein, for anyone who has ever read anything about epistemology.

Now I’m going to take a wild guess here, but I’ll assume that most of you can relate to at least some of what I say. You either have struggled with diagnosed mental illness, have been abused, belong to a fringe personality type, an impressive IQ or maybe just happen to be gay. And you know why? Because this is AO3! This is the fan fiction social network, no, not like the other fan fiction social networks; this one is centered on pretentious literary inclined people like me and you. We are a niche market here! But that’s why I love this site so much! I feel at home here, I find the things that are made for me here, all the gay literary superhero porn, literature, comedy and occasional politically inclined, unrelated post. This is my community! And it is small, and I wouldn’t want it to get any bigger.

Imagine for a second that you are a kid in school, throwing airplanes in class while the teacher isn’t looking. And suddenly one day, the teachers have decided to make it obligatory to throw at least one plane a day per class, because there’s just not enough origami representation in the classroom. So if the teacher hasn’t caught a plane in the whole day, she will sit on the desk demanding that somebody does it now. WELL NOW YOU WON’T WANT TO DO IT it’s not fun anymore! This was my thing! This was my cheesy angst fiction, filled with memes and fun, and it was mine! I don’t want some generic, Hollywood turn on it. Especially not one made by Marvel, the wealthiest movie franchise with the worst track record of writing relationships. Fuck that! Some conservatives are talking about LGBT people appropriating Captain America, but I think this is Captain America appropriating gay culture.

When you look at what’s popular amongst Yaoi fan culture, you don’t find BL titles very often, and when you do, it’s almost always webcomics. What you find more of, is ambiguous sort ay but not stated character dynamics.

You know why? Because it’s not fun that way!

If they are already gay and in an established relationship, then what is even the point? This is why in my own projects, I often have a standard: If the story, characters and premise has taken me less than 6 months to map out, then I can make it explicit bl, because it’s a trash story, it’s something I make for entertainment and has little value of reflection and comparability. In other words, I doubt anyone would bother speculating about it.

However, if my story is complex enough to take me a year to map out, then I don’t blow it by having every character’s emotions about every character established, most of my characters don’t even get any romantic completion to their stories and the explicitly gay relationships I make often follow two rules: Number one, both of the characters are the awesome side characters that everyone cares about more than the main characters type. And two: they must suffer horribly throughout their lives, never end up together and if possible, die. This is because, again, the more frustrated you get with canon, the more you will want to make your take on it.

This is why making an original work is much tougher than writing fan fiction. And why making my silly BLs for passing time is much easier than crafting a meaningful story. When you write something serious, you often have to write according not to what you would want to see happen, but what you want to want to see happen. Imagine three levels of reality for a second. The first one is the current reality; this is the way things are, regardless of you. The second level is what you would like reality to be like instead. Finally, there’s the third level, which incorporates what you want to want to see happen in reality.

In simpler terms. I sure would like to see Tony Stark sucking Steve Rogers’ dick, which is why I write fan fiction about it. But I don’t really want to see it happen. I just want to engage in the process of wanting it. If there was a scene in Civil War, in which Cap received a bj from Tony, I would be rabid! It would singlehandedly ruin everything, each of my conjectures about how and if that would happen would be out of the window, gone, forever. And on top of that, it would probably be a terrible scene because Marvel movie scripts are made by a bunch of nerds with no understanding of how romantic relationships work; at least that’s my explanation for it.

To put it into perspective, imagine if Pulp Fiction showed you what was in the case, or if 2001 spelled out the meaning of the Star Child for you. It would be so much worse. The reason why it’s fun to speculate is that we don’t have all the answers.

Or, if that explanation seemed like an overreaching complex drabble, let us talk about sex for pedagogic purposes:

Picture a BDSM scene, and in order to stay thematic, imagine Bucky Barnes tied up on the ground and Cap in high heels holding a whip. Now I doubt our hypothetical masochistic Bucky Barnes is interested in yet another beating, he’s had plenty of those. However, he could very well be interested in a reenactment of a beating with limits set out by him. He would have a safe word to protect him, so naturally when he says “stop” what he means is “harder”.

And in this situation, we are all masochistic Bucky Barnes. We will state that we want something, namely Cap giving Bucky a whipping, but we don’t actually want Cap to breach his limits of consent and hurt him even more. In other words, we want something similar to but no actually the real deal. Imagine if after Bucky said “stop”, Steve dropped the whip and apologized to Bucky with tears on his eyes (which is exactly what he would do). Total mood kill.

So please, Do NOT get Captain America a boyfriend, We like our marginally ambiguous, sexual tension-inclined, perfect symbol of American straight white male who is a hero and not a villain just fine, thank you very much. And remember kids, envy is the worst sin, it doesn’t feel good, and it doesn’t make anybody like you. Don’t hate the normies, because if you do, then you become a fucking normie.

**Author's Note:**

> I was a bit scared to post this, honestly, so far i've stayed on the fence in this site, not wanting to get hate for my views in here too since i'd rather get hate for my inability to keep up with promises about my fics or my refusal to use synonyms to stop repeating the names. But now that I've come out as politically oriented person, I think the doors have opened for me, and I can stop pussyfooting around some subjects, which has inspired me to create yet another set of side chapters in my series. This one will be called "Superheroes React" and it will consist of Steve and Tony watching a number of things and talking about them. I will pay special attention to requests for that and probably use it as a venting method to write my opinions on whatever news happen in the future.
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> also: DEAR GOD WHY DO YALL PEOPLE KEEP ASSUMING I'M STRAIGHT!?!?!?!?! I'VE HAD LOADS AND LOADS OF GAY SEX FOR A STRAIGHT PERSON, I SHOULD LET MY GIRLFRIEND KNOW, THAT I'M STRAIGHT BECAUSE SOME IDIOTS ON THE INTERNET WHO CAN'T READ OR PURPOSELY IGNORE THE MULTIPLE OCCASIONS IN WHICH I SAY THAT I'M GAY SAY SO. WHO IS ALIENATING GAY PEOPLE HERE???? GOSH WHAT A BUNCH OF HYPOCRITES. And pulling the racist card is a low blow, but pulling the "you are straight hence your opinion is invalid" one is even lower!


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